What The Butler Saw

Author: Joe Orton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472536665
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 96

Book Description
"Joe Orton's last play, What the Butler Saw, will live to be accepted as a comedy classic of English literature" (Sunday Telegraph) The chase is on in this breakneck comedy of licensed insanity, from the moment when Dr Prentice, a psychoanalyst interviewing a prospective secretary, instructs her to undress. The plot of What the Butler Saw contains enough twists and turns, mishaps and changes of fortune, coincidences and lunatic logic to furnish three or four conventional comedies. But however the six characters in search of a plot lose the thread of the action - their wits or their clothes - their verbal self-possession never deserts them. Hailed as a modern comedy every bit as good as Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Orton's play is regularly produced, read and studied. What the Butler Saw was Orton's final play."He is the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility" (Observer)

The Complete Plays

Author: Joe Orton
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802132154
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 458

Book Description
This volume contains every play written by Joe Orton, who emerged in the 1960s as the most talented comic playwright in recent English history. Orton, who was murdered in 1967 at the age of thirty-four, was considered the direct successor to Wilde, Shaw, and Coward. Includes: The Ruffian on the Stair Entertaining Mr. Sloane The Good and Faithful Servant Loot The Erpingham Camp Funeral Games What the Butler Saw

Loot

Author: Joe Orton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472517512
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 171

Book Description
A black farce masterpiece, Loot follows the fortunes of two young thieves, Hal and Dennis. Dennis is a hearse driver for an undertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlour and have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's mother has just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the body elsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, the thickened plot turns topsy-turvy. Playing with all the conventions of popular farce, Orton creates a world gone mad and examines in detail English attitudes at mid-century. The play has been called a Freudian nightmare, which sports with superstitions about death - and life. It is regularly produced in professional and amateur productions. First produced in London in 1966, Loot was hailed as "the most genuinely quick-witted, pungent and sprightly entertainment by a new, young British playwright for a decade" (Sunday Telegraph). The Student Edition offers a plot summary, full commentary, character notes and questions for study, besides a chronology and bibliography.

Orton Complete Plays

Author: Joe Orton
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472537254
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
I suppose I'm a believer in Original Sin. People are profoundly bad but irresistibly funny' Joe Orton. This volume contains everything that Orton wrote for the theatre, radio and television from his first play in 1964, The Ruffian on the Stair, up to his violent death in 1967 at the age of 34. It includes his major successes: Entertaining Mr Sloane, which 'made more blood boil that any other British play in the last ten years' (The Times); Loot, 'a Freudian nightmare', which sports with superstitions about death - as well as life; his farce masterpiece, What the Butler Saw; The Erpingham Camp, his version of The Bacchae, set in a Butlin's holiday resort; together with his television plays, Funeral Games and The Good and Faithful Servant. The volume includes a revealing introduction by John Lahr, Orton's official biographer."He is the Oscar Wilde of Welfare State gentility" (Observer)

Contact Wounds

Author: Jonathan Kaplan
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802142788
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
The author of The Dressing Station offers a powerful memoir of the author's experiences in a combat-zone hospital in Iraq, sharing stories of his father's experiences as a surgeon on the battlefield in World War II. Reprint.

Prick Up Your Ears

Author: John Lahr
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 9781504031479
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Story of murder/suicide of playwright Joe Orton and his lover, Ken Halliwell. When Orton, after years of unsuccessful collaboration with Halliwell, breaks away and achieves fame and fortune on his own, Halliwell cracks, hammers Orton to death and then kills himself.

Orton Diaries

Author: Joe Orton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780413777249
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description

The Visitors

Author: Joe Orton
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802136282
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
In "Fred and Madge," a married couple has the unending jobs of rolling boulders uphill and sieving water all day long; and in "The Visitors," a dying man is visited in the hospital by his middle-aged daughter.

Funeral games

Author: Joe Orton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780416073904
Category : English drama
Languages : en
Pages : 90

Book Description

Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century

Author: Mark Lilly
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814750818
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
In gay men's writing, tenderness lies side by side with rage; existential rejection of convention rubs shoulders with sexual hedonism. Beginning with Wilde's and Byron's existentialist outlaw, the theme of social rebellion, and the fight against conformity, form a common link among the literary works of the twentieth century. But mainstream academic criticism has shown itself for the most part incapable of engaging gay work without distorting or ignoring its most central features.